


In the Golden Hour

by rowofstars



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2018-04-16 12:38:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4625625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowofstars/pseuds/rowofstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are stories about the big bad wolf. The only truth is that she has always been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Golden Hour

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the lovely [](http://fionissima.livejournal.com/profile)[fionissima](http://fionissima.livejournal.com/)'s birthday, fashionably belated. Canon is just a guideline. Liberties were taken. I hope you like it. Beta'd by [](http://stillxmyxheart.livejournal.com/profile)[stillxmyxheart](http://stillxmyxheart.livejournal.com/). Recognizable dialogue shamelessly borrowed from Doctor Who.

They stand together, the three of them, on the cliffs overlooking Arcadia.

The fields of tall grass bend and sway and dip in the wind, illuminated by the light of distant fires and the crumbling moon. It is the end of winter and there are still bits of snow melting into the dirt and a crisp breeze making the taste of the air less ashen and thick. The roses will be blooming in the gardens soon, and she sighs. After today they will exist in memory only.

They came from the Citadel with the rest, the last, to stand against both sides. It was a time for heroes, but time was already lost to the flames. On the horizon they can see the Eye of Harmony perched above the capital, twisting and writhing, furiously mourning the loss of her children.

Their minds are quiet, save for each other, and they can feel fate pressing in around them.

“Which one will it be?” she asks.

In her right hand is the key to their salvation and destruction and she holds it out, palm open, for the other two to choose.

The two exchange a look and it is decided. It has always been decided. At the appointed hour, they watch, her and the other, as everything burns.

“Will it hurt?” he asks. He watches her face and the way the red and orange lights of the evening dance through her hair, the gold glowing in her eyes.

She wraps his hand in hers and smiles sadly. “Only for a moment.”

The colors fade, turning the world black and white and he swallows, fixing his gaze on the brilliant white light. “Will it stop the drumming?”

“Yes,” she lies.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They are children first.

They stack Rontgen blocks in the nursery and she laughs when the two bicker and knock over each other’s carefully constructed towers, sending the blocks rolling and purple sparks showering down around her. They chase her to the singing trees and back again, and when they catch her they pull her pigtails to hear her shrill cries. She bites both their fingers, hard enough to draw blood, and when the flavor of it, the sour tang of life, hits her tongue something old stirs inside.

They are only eight when they are brought before the schism. Chaos bubbles over its edges, spilling fear and havoc at their feet, a forever bleeding wound in time and space. It is a thing that has less right to exist than they, yet somehow has always been.

The first runs and never looks back.

The second goes mad and never knows silence again.

And she sees her destiny spelled out in seven letters.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She hides, but he finds her.

It is the in-between time, and though it all should be speeding backwards, caught up in the rewind he started and then chose to ignore, there are still pockets stitched into the lining, exempt and secret. She’s curled into a corner of the sofa with a book, warmed by the fire and wrapped in a red cloak, the only thing she ever saved of home.

The knock at the door is unsurprising, having known long ago, in those brief instants where the lucidity of time and space was open to her, he would come to be hers again, if only for a moment. There is nothing to see outside the small cottage but miles and miles of dark heavy woods, the bare branches stretching up into the vacant sky like so many boney arms. It seems like it has been winter for ages, if there were such a thing as seasons in a place like this.

She looks him over and leans against the doorframe, cape spilling around her feet in velvet pools. “You’re late.”

He smiles crookedly and she steps aside, holding the door open. “Yes, I am, for a wedding as it happens.”

She raises an eyebrow and pushes the door closed, bolting it shut. It seems silly but there are scavengers even in these obfuscated spaces.

“Yes, well,” he says, moving into the room and tilting his head this way and that, turning slowly in a wobbly circle as he looks about. “Not entirely my fault, though. Impossible to predict how long it will take someone to remember you.”

She nods and smiles knowingly, and settles back into the same corner of the couch. He pours tea and they sit quietly next to each other as time forgets them for a while.

A few years spin past the window, fluttering the floral print curtains. She smiles at him over the rim of her cup and asks, “Do you remember the song the trees used to play when the breeze was from the south?”

He reaches out a hand to brush her hair back, still as soft as the first time he tugged on it and made her squeal.

“It was your favorite,” he replies with a soft smile. Then his face falls and his eyes drift to the window and the darkness beyond. “And his.”

She sighs and fingers the edge of his bowtie, feeling the slightly raised texture under the pad of her thumb. It’s another new face for him, another forced on him by a random resorting of DNA. But hers she chooses, unchanged from the one he knew a lifetime ago, the one he asked twice, rescued with a word and favored above all others. Her fingers trace the edge of his chin and gently snap his braces. He feigns injury, though his grin says otherwise.

She takes another sip of tea. “Sometimes I remember.”

“Sometimes I forget,” he admits.

Her finger curls around the handle, thumb against the top and the side fitted into her other palm. Her eyes follow the loops of the silver filigree around the top, an endless pattern of flattened figure eights, starting and stopping nowhere.

Her lips twist. “I wish I could. But I’m not like you.”

He sighs. “No, you aren’t. You’re the best of us.”

 _Us._ Always the three, the lost, and the ones who never had a chance to be anything other than what they are. Changing faces and times and bodies and places doesn’t change their fates, she saw to that. In the end they forgive her, though. It was never her choice either.

He holds her left hand, lifting it to lie across his thigh, her fingers splayed out over the brown fabric. There’s a mark on her ring finger, the remains of an impression decades in the making but only just beginning to fade. He covers her hand with his, his fingers lining up with the gaps between hers, still perfect.

“Were you happy?” he asks carefully, eyes fixed on the symmetry of their hands.

“For a time,” she answers. Neither of them looks up.

She leans into him, turning her palm up and his fingers curl over and around hers, loose, but enough. She looks up then and sees him for the first time in what seems like nine forevers, though they both know the exact count down to the last second. His other hand rises, cradling her cheek and she lets her head fall into his touch. She thinks he may kiss her or that she may kiss him, and there’s the old longing again that has never cared about the shape of his face or the color of his eyes.

She still has a soft spot for blue, though.

He tilts his head up and presses his lips to her forehead. “It’s time for me to go.”

She follows him to the door.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The words surround her, on the wall, on the building, spread out in white chalk beneath her and she knows they are trying to tell her something, to lead her somewhere.

There are moments when she can almost remember what she is capable of, the things that were necessary, burdens she knows only in the early hours, before awake and after dreams. Sometimes she can recall all their faces as smiling and wise, not twisted in the agony of the flames.

She remembers looking into time itself, and time looking back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Five hundred thousand years apart from her, he waits, facing down the same old enemies, vowing that this time it really will end, for her, for Susan, for the other lost son. He has forgotten so many things, but never how to fight.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The schism roils and tumbles before her, a swirling mass of black pitch that wants to draw her in and devour her. But there in the center, a flicker, a spark, a gentle rising glow that only she can see. They are about to pull her away and bring forward the next but she steps out of their grasp and smiles.

 _I understand_ , she says to no one.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She glows like the flames of his nightmares, white hot and gold at the edges, warm and tempting and ruinous. She is made of music and love and vengeance, here to reap what had been sown so long ago.

_I create myself._

And it is the simplest thing she has ever understood. She is because she wants to be, because she made herself be.

_A message, to lead myself here._

She will save him, her Doctor, and she will save Jack too, and still maybe the other forgotten child of Gallifrey. She loves them all, burns with it, and she will render them all to dust in the end.

_I can see everything._

_Again_ , she doesn’t say, because this is not the first or last time the universe will lay itself bare for her. They are the same, she and it, all that ever is and was and could be. She has no beginning or end, only new faces.

He wants to look away but he can’t, drawn into the fire of her creation once again. There are hundreds of ways he could take it from her, but in the end he chooses the most intimate, touching his lips to hers as they have done for a thousand lifetimes. It leaps out of her and forces its way inside him, pushing, shoving and burning through his mind in the space between heartbeats, shattering everything he ever was and scattering it like she scattered her words.

For a moment they are one, existing everywhere and everywhen, and they both know how it will end, the bang and the whimper.

 

 

* * *

 

 

When he holds his brother in his arms, begging and pleading, he does not think of her, of how this is has all come to pass. He only longs for there to be another, for his mind to be filled with noise where the other desires only silence. They have always been this way, the two of them, opposites and equals, burning destiny at both ends.

She stands behind them in a red dress, loving till the end. She will mourn him the best, the most, and be labeled mad. _It’s fitting_ , she thinks.

The gun is still warm.

 

 

* * *

 

 

For the first year they never use their chosen names.

It’s their first act of defiance and won’t be the last, all ways of delaying the inevitable. In the middle of their second year she kisses him on the cheek under two full moons because it’s supposed to be good luck. He kisses her pressed against a singing tree in the afternoon, hands holding her face like she’s too precious to let go of, the bark digging into her back. When he pulls away she says his name for the first time and he smiles and embraces her, burying his nose in her fragrant hair. Over his shoulder she can see the other, his eyes wide in shock, fists clenched at his side. Before she can call out, say she can find enough love in her bones for both of them, he stalks away.

Later she will find him in his room.

“Do you love him?” he asks.

When he looks in her eyes she doesn’t have to answer, but opens her mouth to do so anyway and he stops her with a hand.

“I always knew, I suppose.” He shakes his head sadly, looking out the window and down the steep side of the mountain. Solitude they named it, and it is just one more thing he has come to understand. “You were never really mine.”

“I was never really anyone’s,” she says.

The truth is they were never really children.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“She saved me for _you_ , Doctor.”

He stares at his friend, his brother, and weeps because he knows it is true.

He gasps against the blood filling his throat and fights the tingle of energy building in his veins, the desire for self-preservation. “I never asked to be saved.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Building the cannon is the easy part.

Going back, seeing what they wrought is hard. The ghosts haunt her, stare back at her from the abyss with their accusing white eyes. They follow her as she jumps, glimmers in her peripheral vision, footsteps behind her on an empty street, her sister’s perfume on the wind and the other’s wild laughter, ringing in her ears like the temple bells.

It doesn’t feel the least bit strange to her, all these people and places and timelines, woven together like so many threads into a pattern so big and wide she can only look at one tiny square at a time lest she go blind from its beauty. For five seconds she doesn’t exist. She floats in the Void, peaceful and calm, wrapped in a blanket of nothing. If she tries she can almost hear it, a melody with no notes and no words, as intimate as the beating of her heart or the feel of his hand in hers. But when she tumbles out the other side there is only dust and scrapes on her knees and questioning eyes, the song lost once again.

Another jump and another street, a future of smoke and crumbled buildings too familiar and yet not hers. A voice, his voice maybe, shouts.

_Run._

And she does because she has always been good at running. She was taught by the best.

There is no peace for the survivors.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_Blaidd Drwg._

_Bad Wolf._

There is a reverence in his voice under the layers of confusion. She blinks and their eyes meet; a flicker of memory passes between them, of silver singing trees and a field of fire and wheat. Her hand tightens around the key in her pocket, the cool metal digging into her fingers. It was decided for them and before them, yet she feels guilty all the same.

“Everywhere we go,” he says. “Two words following us.”

 _Following me_ , she thinks, but it is fleeting at best.

He shrugs and she grins and it is yet another thing necessarily forgotten. There is a time and place, after all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How long are you going to stay with me?”

“Forever.”

And it is anything but a lie.


End file.
